THE Friday Boys are a disparate group of men spread across Tyneside who meet once a week - 'always on a Friday' - to talk about the arts, raise a glass to recently departed heroes and villains and, at the evening's end, down a whisky or two. The FBs have only one golden rule - talk of the working week is strictly off-limit.

Saturday, 5 April 2014

Robert Capa in World War II

Lovers and fighters: Robert Capa's best second world war photographyCapa, one of the world's most distinguished war photographers, famously said: 'If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough.' And close he certainly was, accompanying US forces to Europe from 1943-1945. From D-Day landings to a soldier wandering a lane with his sweetheart, his images are on show at Daniel Blau gallery in London until 10 May

theguardian.com

Thursday 3 April 2014

'Joyous Marchers, Italian POWs on the Route to Messina', c. August 19, 1943.

'Collaborationist is Scorned by Her People, Chartres, France', August 18, 1944.

'Working Through Beach Obstacles on the French Coast on D-Day', June 6, 1944.

Robert Capa is the Twentieth Century’s most celebrated war photographer.

Reporting from five horrific theatres of war – the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II in Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War – Capa’s enduring legacy is an extraordinary body of ‘concerned photography’ – deeply felt pictures documenting the human condition.

This exhibition comprises rare vintage Capa prints from the period 1943 to 1945. Many are exhibited here for the first time, and some are newly recognised as his.

In 1942, Capa was a war correspondent accompanying American forces on their push from North Africa into Italy. He was in Sicily in July – August 1943, and Naples in early October 1943, and went on to photograph the European Theatre more widely, including London, Normandy and the liberation of Paris.

He was part of the second wave of US troops to land on Omaha beach in 1944, where in the first couple of hours of the invasion he famously shot 106 pictures on the two Contax II cameras he carried, of which only 11 photographs survived.

Rooted in social documentary, Capa’s work was made at the heart of the matter. He was instinctive, audacious, brave, cavalier, even reckless, saying: “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.